UNITED NATIONS
27 February 2025
Mr. President, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen; it is my honour to address you in my capacity as Special Rapporteur during this enhanced interactive dialogue on Eritrea.
I recognise Eritrea’s increased engagement with some universal human rights mechanisms over the past year, including its participation in its 4th Universal Periodic Review and in its review by the Committee on the Rights of the Child. I also welcome Eritrea’s ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I am encouraged by these developments and hope they reflect Eritrea’s willingness not only to engage at the international level, but also to take action to improve the situation on the ground by implementing the recommendations of various human rights mechanisms.
At the same time, I regret that Eritrea continues to ignore my requests to meet with government representatives or to visit the country. I reiterate my willingness to engage with the Eritrean authorities in a constructive spirit, with the only agenda of improving the human rights situation.
Your Excellencies, the reality is that Eritrea continues to face a grave and longstanding human rights crisis characterized by the repression of fundamental rights, impunity and a complete lack of access to justice for victims. The widespread and systematic suppression of the freedoms of association, assembly, expression and opinion over the past three decades, has created a climate of fear. As a result, there are no independent media outlets, civil society organisations, or political parties in Eritrea. Freedom of religion or belief is repressed, with periodic waves of mass arrests and efforts to control all aspects of religious life and institutions.
The situation of Eritrean victims of enforced disappearance remains extremely concerning. Hundreds of families of disappeared Eritreans live with the agony of uncertainty. This is the plight of dozens of Eritrean Muslim leaders and teachers disappeared since the 90s, religious figures, political dissidents, of journalists like Sium Tsehaye and Dawit Isaak. This situation is ongoing, in some cases for over 30 years. Their families have a right to the truth. I strongly urge the government of Eritrea to provide them with information on the state of health and location of their loved ones. In the cases where disappeared persons are still alive, I call on the authorities to promptly release them, and in the case of deceased persons, to finally deliver their remains to the families.
30 years on from the first round of the national service programme, the authorities continue to ignore calls for reform, including for the limitation of its indefinite duration. While the stated goals of the national service of self-sufficiency and development are laudable, in practice the programme keeps Eritreans in a system of forced labour for years. Citizens are coerced to take part through detention, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment and the punishment of their families. In fact, the national service has impacted all aspects of life in Eritrea, from its economic structure or the ability of Eritreans to choose their profession or have dignified work, to the high rates of desertion at the high school level, to the right to family life, with Eritrean children growing up with absent fathers, and mothers forced to take the load of sustaining the family on their own. It also continues to push thousands of Eritreans to seek asylum abroad.
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
At a time when human rights are under attack, when communities worldwide are polarized between those who no longer have faith in human rights and those who will suffer from the pushback on fundamental freedoms, now more than ever, it is crucial to protect the integrity and legitimacy of this Council and of the universal human rights mechanisms. Now, more than ever, I feel compelled to stress the importance of going beyond political slogans, broad statements and reporting requirements, and call on Eritrea to take concrete and specific measures to implement the recommendations of human rights mechanisms. Without implementation, without engagement by the concerned State, and without sustained pressure by Member States to ensure accountability and action on human rights issues, reports will be little more than empty and shallow words, and reviews by these mechanisms will become box-ticking exercises. This is how people lose faith in the human rights architecture. And it is up to Member States to uphold the promise of human rights and preserve the integrity of this Council.
I call on Member States to apply the principles of impartiality, objectivity, and non-selectivity, so often invoked in this room, and critically assess the factual evidence presented before them over the years by my mandate, my two predecessors, the Commission of Inquiry on Eritrea, by dozens of international and diaspora human rights organizations, investigative journalists, and by the thousands of Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers spread across the globe, who were forced to flee the country they love deeply and dream of returning home one day. I appeal to Human Rights Council Members, and in particular to States with ties to Eritrea, to deploy every tool at their disposal to promote progress on human rights situation.
Dr. Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker. UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea.
